by Juno Rushdan
For a few seconds anyway.
She didn’t deserve to be accused of treason and definitely didn’t deserve to have her life invaded by him—a professional liar and bloody butcher by trade.
Their traitor was skilled at subterfuge and manipulation. On the off chance Willow was an Oscar-worthy actress, pretenses faltered under strain. Like in the high-stress situation she’d just been through. She wasn’t the mole, but he needed to prove her innocence beyond a doubt.
And then he’d stay far away from her.
The old man banged on the window. “Willow! I’m starving!” He disappeared, the curtains falling back into place.
She hustled up the walkway to the front stoop, Gideon staying a stride behind her.
As she fumbled with her key, the door swung open. Her father sat in a wheelchair, blocking the entryway, his liver-spotted face pinched in a grimace.
“You’re almost two hours late and you didn’t call. I have to take my medicine. Where’s your car? And who’s this?” He scowled at Gideon.
Willow shooed her father back with both hands. The house was a moderate twenty degrees cooler than the oven-baked temp outside.
“Sorry I’m late, Dad. I had a car accident and I didn’t think to call.”
“You hurt? Got whiplash? Concussion?” Withered from age and sickness, the gray-haired man rolled to the kitchen. He wore a bathrobe and cotton pajamas. An IV bag hung from the back of the wheelchair. “I keep telling you, women are lousy drivers.”
She tossed her purse on the tile countertop and washed her hands. Gideon hovered in the natural divide between the eat-in kitchen and the living room.
“My car was towed.” Willow dried her hands. “But I’m fine, thanks to Gideon.”
And luck. The situation could’ve played out much differently, where she didn’t walk away. After he’d deflated the airbag, seeing her swamped with fear and shock had twisted something inside him. He’d wanted to gather her in his arms and make sure she wasn’t hurt.
“Nice to meet you, Mr. Harper. I’m Gideon Stone.” He proffered his hand. “The accident wasn’t her fault. Your daughter handled the situation remarkably well.”
Her dad stared at Gideon’s extended hand, then cut his eyes back to Willow. “Why didn’t you bring me a double bacon cheeseburger and fries if you were going to be late?”
Gideon dropped his hand, taking in the understated furnishings situated to accommodate a wheelchair. The homey living room was spotless, devoid of clutter, like the kitchen.
“It’s bad for your heart.” She sighed. “Why didn’t you microwave a frozen meal?”
“You promised to cook for me every night this week. And you have chicken à la king labeled for Thursdays in the freezer. Last time I took a meal out of order, you got all squirrelly.”
“It’s tuna, not chicken.”
His mouth twisted, nose scrunching. “Tastes like à la friggin’ ass. I won’t eat it. I want a damn burger.” He pounded a wrinkled fist on a round yellow Formica table the seventies rejected. “I’m dying. I can have a burger once a month. I’ve earned it.”
“I’m only doing what’s best for you, following the doctor’s advice.”
Gideon preferred to make things easier for her after the hell she’d been through earlier, but he had a job to do. “A burger or pizza sounds great. I’m starved. May I have a cup of water?”
Her shoulders bunched. “Glasses are there.” She pointed as she dug into the freezer.
He ventured into the kitchen, ignoring her father’s flagging glower, and opened a cabinet. Spices and seasoning were arranged in alphabetical order. Organization taken to the nth degree. He grabbed a glass from the next cabinet, filled it with tap water, and took a sip.
“Even what’s his name is in favor of a burger. Or pizza. Sounds so good.”
“How about a Friday meal, Dad? Tortellini surprise. I bet you’d like that one.”
Her sweet optimism—despite Mr. Harper barking complaints and Gideon’s deliberately inciteful suggestion—was another reason he admired her. She had fortitude.
“I like good surprises,” said her father. “The kind that make me happy. Not the ones you keep frozen in those Tupperware containers.”
With the distraction in full swing, Gideon asked, “Willow, where’s the bathroom?”
The father wheeled back, eyeing him as if his presence was an invasion of his territory.
“Down the hall.” Willow put a meal in the microwave. “Second door on the left.”
“Don’t nuke that,” Mr. Harper said. “Order a pizza. Or make waffles. I’ll eat those.”
“Breakfast for dinner again?” Her voice dipped low and turned pleading. “Not while I have company. Please, eat the tortellini.”
“I’ll eat it without a fuss if you give me some whiskey to wash down the unpleasantness.”
As Willow fought with her father, holding her own against the ornery old bulldog, Gideon headed down the hall. He poked his head into two bedrooms, both outfitted with the basics of spare rooms. Bypassing the bathroom, he ducked into what appeared to be the master. Pill bottles lined the low dresser and an oxygen tank sat in the corner. Her father’s room.
He eavesdropped on the chatter in the kitchen. Willow mentioned putting a movie on for her father. Gideon had a little time, but not much. He darted down the stairs into the basement.
Hopper windows partially illuminated the space. The walls were a warm white with a touch of beige. It had a bright, refurbished look of a modern apartment. He hesitated to walk on the plush cream carpet with his boots, but he didn’t have seconds to spare removing them.
He trod lightly to the desk at the opposite side of the large room. Three computer monitors sat side by side. Papers piled in untidy heaps were the first sign of any mess in the house. She probably had some order in the apparent chaos. He tapped a button on the keyboard.
A prompt on the middle screen awaited a password. He inserted the cloning flash drive and hit the Enter button, activating it. A red light blinked. The download was in progress.
He fingered through a stack of magazines. Clean Eating, Simple and Delicious, Cooking Light. He shifted his attention to the loose sheets of paper. Programming code, algorithms, grocery lists, questions to ask doctors about her dad’s health.
A file cabinet drawer was closed but unlocked. Noise from upstairs sounded as if she’d turned on a television. He flipped through folders of recipes, medical information about her father, and hospital bills. Her world revolved around work and her dad—innocent enough, even heartwarming—but she had a mountain of debt. Money was a classic motive. Opportunity for her to access classified data without detection had already been established.
But Willow wasn’t a murderer. No way she’d killed Novak.
A green light popped up on the USB drive. He ejected it, shoving it into his pocket. Turning, he noticed a full-sized bed made neater than a pin in the next room. He palmed the door open wider. Her tight bedroom only had extra space for a dresser and nightstand.
He went in, opened the bedside table drawer, and found a leather-bound book.
Diaries always led to trouble. Any secret worth keeping shouldn’t be written down, not even shared with a trusted friend. People were fallible and could be compromised.
He leafed through the pages. Doodles. Algorithms. A circular pattern of intricate lines repeated—a maze with a bull’s head drawn in the center. Words on one page stayed his hand.
Briarwood
Bridge of Sighs
Symphony
The Ghost
Names of previous ops over the last three years that’d had hiccups. All due to their mole?
The Ghost, Aleksander Novak, had confirmed the leak. In exchange for immunity, Novak had agreed to give details about an information broker who bartered secrets using a global network of sp
ies. One name—the deadly spider controlling a funnel-web of traitors. But they’d failed to keep Novak alive long enough to talk.
Their team had pored over previous ops, looking for a link to their insider, any indication other missions had been tampered with. But they had no idea how far back to look. No clue how long they’d had a traitor among them. Gideon turned the page and his breath stalled.
More mazes drawn around a single word. Babel. A code name for the operation to kill Daedalus, one of Gideon’s solo missions. He’d volunteered for it to get distance from the problems smothering his marriage. Less than twenty-four hours after he’d returned, Kelli had been killed in a car accident. Guilt still weighed on him.
A keen analyst would connect the dots between compromised ops, searching for a pattern, a common thread tied to the leak. But this list of classified missions in an unsecured place violated Protocol 101. It could also be notes of someone looking to wrap up loose ends. That’s how Ares or Alistair would see it if either of them got their hands on it.
Except evidence left in a notebook in a bedside table would be sloppy, too careless for a traitor who had, thus far, been pathological about covering their tracks.
Why had she written Babel? Nothing had gone wrong on his op to terminate Daedalus.
“It’s only fair for you to go through my stuff after I looked through your glove box.” The angelic lilt of her voice made his pulse spike.
He didn’t turn at once, taking a beat to decide on his approach, and looked at her. She sauntered toward him with a guileless smile. There was nothing flirtatious about it. She moved divested of the surety of purpose she carried in the office, now seeming uncertain and unguarded.
Willow eased into the narrow space beside him with her back to the wall.
A gentleman would’ve moved away, not taken advantage of her raw emotions in the wake of the car crash, but he was no gentleman. And she was a job.
She’d listed classified operations, and he needed to know why.
He faced her, almost bringing their bodies flush. His physical awareness of her was so palpable, desire was a live wire crackling through him. But after reading the ASD card, he was reluctant to lay a finger on her. Better to let her initiate contact in the same manner he’d let her determine their proximity.
“I don’t want you to have the wrong impression about me from my emergency responder card.” She wrung her hands but met his eyes. “I don’t want you to think you can’t touch me. You can. I want you to, if you want to. I-I know you wouldn’t hurt me.”
She put a palm flat on his sternum. Her slender fingers feathered across his chest, stroking him like he was a piece of fragile glass that might break.
The gentleness was startling. With a target, he stayed numb. Impervious. But when she touched him, a tenderness he didn’t know he possessed—and couldn’t afford to keep—bloomed.
This was just a means to an end, nothing more. He couldn’t forget that.
“In your journal,” he said, keeping his tone curious rather than accusatory, as gentle as he knew how, “why do you have missions written down?”
The color bled from her face. She lowered her head, curling her fingers against her chest. If only he had a playlist of moves to loosen her up. Maybe he needed to act naturally but take everything down from a ten to a two. He brushed his knuckles up her arms, forcing himself to go slowly, and looked for the subtlest indication that his advance was unwanted.
She relaxed in degrees—her clenched hand opened, and lowered, fingertips skimming his thighs, and she looked up at him. “There were whispers Novak’s death wasn’t suicide. A couple of nights ago, I started thinking about other missions where something had gone wrong.”
“Why all the drawings?” he asked.
“I have trouble sleeping.” Her voice was a whisper. “Doodling relaxes me.”
Inching higher, he caressed her shoulders. Her genuine warmth and vibrancy reeled him in, daring him to act on baser impulses. “But why a maze with the head of a bull at the center?”
“It’s from the Greek myth about Daedalus and the Minotaur. The king of Crete had Daedalus, a brilliant architect, construct a labyrinth the Minotaur—a violent monster, half bull, half human—could never escape. Those missions are pieces of a puzzle, like working your way out of a labyrinth. Only I’m missing a clue.”
What if with enough time and resources, she could find the mole?
He reached up and hesitated, giving her a chance to retreat, and when she didn’t, he cupped her face. The silkiness of her skin sent a jolt through him.
She gave a shy smile and shivered with an enticing vulnerability that made him ache. Made every muscle in his body tighten with an appetite that was both familiar and foreign.
Ah, hell. He needed to rein things in, not take this too far, so he dropped his hand and propped his forearms on the wall above her head. She ran a palm up his torso, angling her face toward his shoulder and—with a long, deep inhalation—smelled him.
06
Wolf Trap, Virginia
Thursday, July 4, 8:40 p.m. EDT
With Gideon standing close, his arms resting on the wall above her head, the urge to smell him was overwhelming. Before she could stop herself, Willow drew her nose to the crook of his shoulder and inhaled.
God, he smelled good, warm and lemony. Not a sharp citrus, but closer to the mellow freshness of the citronnelle soap Ivy and her wife had brought on their last visit, and there was a manly hint of musk that made her toes curl. There should be dryer sheets that smelled like him.
Her cheeks burned hot with shame. Whenever she stood too close to someone, she had that mortifying compulsion. Crammed elevators were the worst. She avoided them at all costs.
“Did you enjoy that?” Gideon asked.
Squeezing her eyes shut, she couldn’t bear to look at him and see ridicule, or worse, pity. “Smelling you? Or the way you smelled?”
“Both.” His breath licked her face, sending a rush of tingles through her.
She wanted to absorb the air, taste him on her tongue. Pressing her lips together, she risked looking up at him. A bright smile spread across his mouth. Lightness filled her like helium in a balloon, and she laughed, comforted he wasn’t staring as if she were a weirdo.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I can’t help it when I’m in very close proximity to someone.”
He lowered his arms. “So it’s not just an effect I have on you. I’m a little disappointed.”
“Don’t be. You affect me.” Oh boy, did he ever.
His gaze dipped to her mouth. “I liked it. The way you smelled me. Indulge any time.”
Relief bloomed in her chest, and the pull toward him intensified.
“I thought you had to use the bathroom. What are you doing down here in my room?”
“I was curious. About you.”
Her fingers slid over the sculpted muscle of his arm. She was not only still touching him but had groped her way to his bicep. She dropped her hand, grazing his. Long fingers stroked hers in a feathery caress, drawing her belly tight, and she ached for more.
Now primed, she could handle lots more. She clutched his hand, not wanting this to end, and met his gaze. His eyes were mesmerizing, pale yet vivid in color at the same time.
She was staring but couldn’t stop. He leaned in, bringing his mouth close.
Panic bubbled up inside her. Affection was welcomed, but the last time a guy had kissed her, it’d felt like an angry eel had been unleashed in her mouth.
“A ten-second French kiss transfers eighty million germs.”
That gross fact had stopped any other guys from attempting to swap spit. Not that there had been many who’d tried. With her long work hours and sick father, she didn’t get out much.
Gideon looked amused. She hoped he wasn’t laughing at her.
He caressed
her lip with his thumb, and something inside her loosened while other things tightened. “I’ll take my chances,” he said. “You’re worth the risk.”
There went that little tug to him again. “The study also showed that the more partners kissed, the higher the likelihood of them having a similar profile colonizing their tongues.”
“So you’re saying if you like the way I kiss, I should do it a lot.”
Is that what she was saying?
His calloused fingertips stroked the hollow of her throat with titillating lightness, and butterflies collided in her belly.
“Are you afraid of me now?” he asked.
“No.” She liked this side of Gideon. Liked it a lot.
“Do you want me to stop?” His voice was gruff and low.
“No.” An overwhelming need for more, of him and from him, rushed over her.
He lifted her chin and brushed his lips across hers—a sweet, devastating tease that drew her closer with anticipation—and his tongue slipped inside her mouth.
She stiffened, but the unhurried press of his lips, the gentle caress of his tongue, the firmness of his hands had her melting. The mash of mouths and unsettling amount of saliva she’d experienced in the past couldn’t compare to this sensual onslaught. She’d taken Gideon for a man who tore into things rather than savoring them, but she couldn’t have been more wrong.
His fingers trailed down and caressed her breast through her clothes, his mouth growing hungrier, feeding her own appetite for him. Everything inside her was turned on, lit brighter than a one-hundred-watt LED bulb.
A groan rumbled in his throat, and with startling abruptness, he broke off the kiss. She shuddered a breath out and rested her head back on the wall, uncertain what to do, hoping the moment wouldn’t end there.
“Are we going to have sex?” Whenever she’d been alone with a man in a bedroom, he kissed her and endeavored to have sex with her. But this was different. Gideon was different.
He drew back slightly. “Do you want to?”
“I’m not sure.” She swallowed thickly. Did she want to be a notch on his bedpost, become a for one night only girl? “I tried it once, and it wasn’t pleasant. He just shoved it in, grunted on top of me for a few minutes, and then it was over.”
